Haisam Elsharkawi is a US citizen of Egyptian descent who was travelling to Mecca in 2017 when he was pulled out the boarding line for his flight from LAX by CBP agents who demanded that he unlock his phones; when he refused and asked for a lawyer, he was handcuffed and taken to an interrogation room where he was questioned and bullied until he unlocked his phones; the CBP officers spent 15 minutes paging through his emails, making snarky remarks about his Amazon purchase history and how many u... Tags: Amazon, Post, News, Law, US, Dhs, CBP, Opsec, Mecca, Borders, Islamophobia, Turkish Airlines, Lorenzo Franceschi Bicchierai, 4a, 5a, Kevin McAleenan

Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai, reporting for Motherboard: In 2016, Apple's head of security surprised the attendees of one of the biggest security conference in the world by announcing a bug bounty program for Apple's mobile operating system iOS. At the beginning, Apple struggled to woo researchers and convince them to report high-value bugs. For the researchers, the main issue was that the bugs they discovered were too valuable to report to Apple, despite rewards as high as $200,000. Companies ... Tags: Apple, Google, Tech, Cupertino, Zimperium, Lorenzo Franceschi Bicchierai, Grayshift, Adam Donefeld, Donefeld

Jason Koebler and Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai received a $100 iPhone X from China and marveled at how convincing the top-to-bottom, software-to-hardware bootleggery is. iOS is recreated down to the pixel as an Android skin; only the sluggish performance, on-screen keyboard give the game away. Even many of the apps are nearly perfect, though once they run into the bad ones, it's immediately clear what is at hand. And how very bad some of them are...
Evans also found “plenty of evidence” of a “... Tags: Google, Gadgets, Post, News, China, Mistakes, Evans, Fakes, Jason Koebler, Lorenzo Franceschi Bicchierai, IMEI MAC

Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai of Motherboard has a chilling story on how hackers flip seized Instagram handles and cryptocurrency in a shady, buzzing underground market for stolen accounts and usernames. Their victim's weakness? Phone numbers. He writes: First, criminals call a cell phone carrier's tech support number pretending to be their target. They explain to the company's employee that they "lost" their SIM card, requesting their phone number be transferred, or ported, to a new SIM card th... Tags: Tech, Lorenzo Franceschi Bicchierai

Joseph Cox, and Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai, reporting for Motherboard: Apple confirmed to The New York Times Wednesday it was going to introduce a new security feature, first reported by Motherboard. USB Restricted Mode, as the new feature is called, essentially turns the iPhone's lightning cable port into a charge-only interface if someone hasn't unlocked the device with its passcode within the last hour, meaning phone forensic tools shouldn't be able to unlock phones. Naturally, this featur... Tags: Apple, Tech, New York Times, Lorenzo Franceschi Bicchierai, Joseph Cox, Grayshift

Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai, reporting for Motherboard: On Monday, at its Worldwide Developers Conference, Apple teased the upcoming release of the iPhone's operating system, iOS 12. Among its most anticipated features are group FaceTime, Animoji, and a ruler app. But iOS 12's killer feature might be something that's been rumored for a while and wasn't discussed at Apple's event. It's called USB Restricted Mode, and Apple has been including it in some of the iOS beta releases since iOS 11.3. T... Tags: Apple, Tech, Worldwide Developers Conference Apple, Lorenzo Franceschi Bicchierai, FaceTime Animoji, Cellebrite Ryan Duff, Cyber Solutions

Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai, writing for Motherboard: Google has released a powerful tool that can help security researchers hack and find bugs in iOS 11.1.2, a very recent version of the iPhone operating system. The exploit is the work of Ian Beer, one of the most prolific iOS bug hunters, and a member of Google Project Zero, which works to find bugs in all types of software, including that not made by Google. Beer released the tool Monday, which he says should work for "all devices." The pro... Tags: Google, Tech, Google Project Zero, Lorenzo Franceschi Bicchierai, Ian Beer, Google Beer

Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai, writing for the Motherboard: Lately on the internet, people in the world of Bitcoin and other digital currencies are starting to use the word "crypto" as a catch-all term for the lightly regulated and burgeoning world of digital currencies in general, or for the word "cryptocurrency" -- which probably shouldn't even be called "currency," by the way. For example, in response to the recent rise of Bitcoin's price, the CEO of Shapeshift recently tweeted: "don't go int... Tags: US, Tech, Bitcoin, Crypto, Google News, Steven Levy, Lorenzo Franceschi Bicchierai, ShapeShift

Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai, writing for Motherboard: Google's platform to deal with bugs and unpatched vulnerabilities had a bug that allowed a security researcher to see a full list of known, unpatched vulnerabilities within Google, creating a kind of bug inception that could have led to more damaging hacks. Alex Birsan, a security researcher, found three vulnerabilities inside the Google Issue Tracker, the company's internal platform where employees keep track of requested features or unpat... Tags: Google, Tech, Lorenzo Franceschi Bicchierai, Alex Birsan, Birsan

Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai, reporting for Motherboard: Months before its catastrophic data breach, a security researcher warned Equifax that it was vulnerable to the kind of attack that later compromised the personal data of more than 145 million Americans, Motherboard has learned. Six months after the researcher first notified the company about the vulnerability, Equifax patched it -- but only after the massive breach that made headlines had already taken place, according to Equifax's own ti... Tags: Tech, Equifax, Lorenzo Franceschi Bicchierai, Equifax Was Warned

Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai, reporting for Motherboard: Until last week, a bug on a T-Mobile website let hackers access personal data such as email address, a customer's T-Mobile account number, and the phone's IMSI, a standardized unique number that identifies subscribers. On Friday, a day after Motherboard asked T-Mobile about the issue, the company fixed the bug. The flaw, which was discovered by security researcher Karan Saini, allowed malicious hackers who knew -- or guessed -- your phone... Tags: Tech, IMSI, Lorenzo Franceschi Bicchierai, Saini, Motherboard asked T Mobile, Karan Saini

Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai, writing for Motherboard: One day, your thermostat will get hacked by some cybercriminal hundreds of miles away who will lock it with malware and demand a ransom to get it back to normal, leaving you literally in the cold until you pay up a few hundred dollars. This has been a scenario that security experts have touted as one of the theoretical dangers of the rise of the Internet of Things, internet-connected devices that are often insecure. On Saturday, what sounds... Tags: UK, Tech, Tierney, Munro, Pen Test Partners, Lorenzo Franceschi Bicchierai

Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai, reporting for Motherboard: On May 12, Tumblr revealed that it had found out about a 2013 data breach affecting 'a set of users' email addresses and passwords, but the company refused to reveal how many users were affected. As it turns out, that number is 68 million, according to an independent analysis of the data. Troy Hunt, a security researcher who maintains the data breach awareness portal Have I Been Pwned, recently obtained a copy of the stolen data set. Hunt... Tags: Tumblr, Hunt, Lorenzo Franceschi Bicchierai

Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai, reporting for Motherboard: There's an oft-repeated adage in the world of cybersecurity: There are two types of companies, those that have been hacked, and those that don't yet know they have been hacked. MySpace, the social media behemoth that was, is apparently in the second category. The same hacker who was selling the data of more than 164 million LinkedIn users last week now claims to have 360 million emails and passwords of MySpace users, which would be one of... Tags: Lorenzo Franceschi Bicchierai

A 2012 LinkedIn hack was much bigger than previously expected, with well over 100 million people potentially at risk, the professional networking site announced earlier this week.
If you've been a member of the site for that long, it's possible that your personal details and password were leaked online by hackers. Assuming your email address has remained constant all this time, you probably got a message like this earlier in the week:
Discomfiting? You bet. While the passwords were encrypted --... Tags: News, Huffington Post, Damon Beres, Lorenzo Franceschi Bicchierai

Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai, reporting for Motherboard: The feds warned that "a group of malicious cyber actors," whom security experts believe to be the government-sponsored hacking group known as APT6, "have compromised and stolen sensitive information from various government and commercial networks" since at least 2011, according to an FBI alert obtained by Motherboard. The alert, which is also available online, shows that foreign government hackers are still successfully hacking and steali... Tags: US, Fbi, United States, Lorenzo Franceschi Bicchierai, Manishs, FBI Says a Mysterious Hacking Group

Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai, reporting for Motherboard: The feds warned that "a group of malicious cyber actors," whom security experts believe to be the government-sponsored hacking group known as APT6, "have compromised and stolen sensitive information from various government and commercial networks" since at least 2011, according to an FBI alert obtained by Motherboard. The alert, which is also available online, shows that foreign government hackers are still successfully hacking and steali... Tags: US, Fbi, United States, Lorenzo Franceschi Bicchierai, FBI Says a Mysterious Hacking Group

The last couple of months have been rather choppy for children’s tech brand VTECH. Two months ago its online app store was hacked and personal data of more than 4.8 million adult customers and 6.3 m children was allegedly stolen causing a major customer outcry. The APP store has been down ever since, until this week, when it sprung back up. The company has apparently upgraded its security in the two months it has been down, but unfortunately in a major PR Fail it also updated its Terms and Condi... Tags: Google, UK, News, Crisis Management, Bbc, Hacking, Vtech, Rory, Rory Cellan Jones, Consumer Technology, PR Fails, Lorenzo Franceschi Bicchierai